DVD firms increase pace of product introductions

Electronic News, Nov 25, 1996

Las Vegas--If the pace of digital versatile disc (DVD)-ROM drive introductions is any indication, the PC market may be the first to encounter the new optical storage technology touted as a replacement for the ubiquitous compact disc, as no fewer than three companies--Panasonic, Hitachi and Pioneer--revealed their product plans here at fall Comdex.

Panasonic announced it would move its product launch up six months to January 1997, perhaps spurred by word that DVD-ROM title developers are massing to create content. The company introduced its internal DVD-ROM drive as part of a plug-and-play package that is said to come complete with all the components needed to deliver DVD on an existing PC platform.

The new drive plays DVD on discs with a 4.7- to 8.5-gigabyte capacity, the equivalent of 7 and 13 CD-ROMs, respectively. Panasonic, which has already introduced stand-alone players in Japan, also demonstrated its DVD-100 and DVD-300 here for the U.S. market, although pricing and availability dates were not disclosed.

DVD-ROM drives, unlike machines built as stand-alone players for playback of motion picture titles, are expected to enter the market first, partly because of the lower expense of content development and in part because hardware vendors and Hollywood are still ironing out copyright issues. And within the DVD-ROM market, educational, and especially business training and corporate-related titles, should take an early lead ahead of games, according to observers.

Designed to operate with CD-ROM, as well as audio and VideoCD, the new drives are also expected to enable vast amounts of local storage for interactive Internet applications.

Pioneer demonstrated a range of DVD products, including a DVD-ROM drive, DVD-R recordable player and a stand-alone DVD device. Available in ATAPI and SCSI-2 interfaces, the DVD-ROM drive will begin shipping in January to OEMs, while the one-time recordable version will follow in 3Q97, appearing first in industrial-based products such as the 100-disc and 500-disc CD-ROM jukeboxes.

Hitachi, too, rolled out its DVD-ROM drive, the GD-100, with a typical access time of 190-milliseconds and claimed 8x the speed of a standard CD-ROM data transfer.

Worldwide shipments of DVD-ROMs are expected to surpass CD-ROM sales in the year 2000, according to International Data Corp. (IDC), with 2001 DVD-ROM unit shipments projected to exceed 117 million units. IDC also reported that DVD's increased storage capacity, improved playback and faster performance could fetch as much as $250 over the price of a standard CD-ROM when the devices first enter retail sales channels.